


Off With Your Head

by ChokolatteJedi



Category: Alice in Wonderland (1951), Twisted Princesses - Jeftoon01
Genre: Animal Sidekick, Character Death, Confusion, Crazy, Dark, Gen, Insanity, Inspired by Art, Inspired by Fanart, Post-Canon, Roses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 04:39:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/474615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChokolatteJedi/pseuds/ChokolatteJedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henrietta was quite confused. She could have sworn that a small mouse wearing a top hat had just run past her window. But that was impossible because animals didn't wear clothes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Off With Your Head

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://th06.deviantart.net/fs48/PRE/i/2009/209/3/f/Twisted_Princess__Alice_by_jeftoon01.jpg) Twisted Princes image made by Jeffery Thomas.

Henrietta was quite confused. She could have sworn that a small mouse wearing a top hat had just run past her window. But that was impossible because animals didn't wear clothes.

A second later, what appeared to be a white rabbit in a waistcoat followed. Confused, Henrietta put her violin aside and quickly slipped out the salon's French doors. She walked around the side of the house towards the garden, where the two creatures had disappeared from view. She saw a dark patch beneath one of the rose bushes and crawled over to investigate it.

Before she knew what was happening, she was falling, tumbling end over end away from the daylight and her mother's prize yellow roses.

*)(*

When Henrietta landed what seemed like quite a while later, she found herself in a small room with no doors or windows. She looked around, but saw neither the mouse nor the rabbit. Not that she was completely sure they had existed in the first place, of course.

The walls were a mixture of wood paneling and brick, and all of it seemed to wobble a bit at the corners of her vision. Red paint appeared to be spattered around, forming hearts and words. Once sentence said "WHO R U?" and another, "Which Alice?" in different lettering. There didn't seem to be any way out, except the way she had come in, which was up.

Deciding to do one last turnabout before attempting to climb back out of the hole, she discovered a girl sitting on a raggedy stuffed chair in a space she was quite sure had been empty a few seconds before. "Oh, I beg your pardon," Henrietta fumbled in shock. "But do you happen to know the way out?"

The other girl frowned at her for a moment, and Henrietta noticed that her eyes were an odd pink color, though her hair was quite a normal shade of blonde, if a bit disheveled. She wore a tattered and stained blue dress, with a similarly soiled white apron and petticoats. She appeared to be holding a cup of tea in one hand, though there was no teapot or service tray around. Finally the girl spoke. "She's going to cut off your head, you know."

"She's going to try," another lilting voice added.

Henrietta looked around, but she couldn't find the other speaker. "Excuse me?"

"She's going to cut off your head," the other girl repeated, then nodded for emphasis. The motion made her head wobble alarmingly, and it was then that Henrietta noticed the bloody line across her neck, and the red blotches on the collar of her dress.

"What? Why? Is that what happened to you?"

"To answer your questions," the other voice spoke again, "in no particular order, mind, 'more or less,' 'just as she said,' and 'because you stole her clotted cream.'"

Henrietta again looked around for the source of the voice, but she found no one but the strange girl. When she looked back, a dirty green top hat had appeared atop the chair. Just when she began to suspect her of being a ventriloquist, like the magician who had performed at Reginald's birth day last month, a pink mist began to form in the girl's lap.

Quickly, the mist coalesced into the form of a peculiar looking striped cat, who stared intently at her. "You shouldn't have done it, you know."

The realization that the lilting voice came from the cat was secondary to Henrietta's understanding of his words. "But I haven't done anything!" she protested.

"Well someone stole her clotted cream, and you know she can't have tarts without it."

"But that wasn't me!" she protested.

"Doesn't matter," the cat replied cheerfully. "She's going to blame you."

"And then off with your head!" the girl added.

"Quite right, Alice." agreed the cat.

"Well then I'll just have to find out who really did it!" Henrietta decided.

"That won't do you any good," the cat said smugly.

"Because we've already eaten it," the girl – Alice – finished.

"What!" Henrietta was beginning to become quite cross. "Then I'll just tell her, whoever she is, that you two are responsible."

The cat vanished without a trace, and the girl smiled smugly. "That won't do you any good," the invisible voice declared.

Alice nodded shakily. "Even if she believed you, she couldn't find Ches-"

"And Alice here has already received the queen's attention," the cat confirmed Henrietta's horrified suspicion.

"So she'd probably just cut off your head for good measure," Alice concluded.

The cat giggled. "Yes. Best to be thorough."

"It really is too bad."

"A shame. But that's what she gets for stealing the clotted cream."

"But I didn't steal it!" Henrietta protested again, feeling very much put out and confused. She blinked – had there always been a stack of books beneath the chair leg? "I simply followed a mouse in a top hat and a rabbit in a waistcoat and fell down a hole in the rose garden!" Even as she said the words they sounded very silly to her ears, but so was everything else about this world.

"Oh?" The cat reappeared on Alice's shoulder. "What color roses?"

"Y-yellow. Why does that matter?"

"Oh she'll cut off your head for sure!" the cat declared. "She hates it when you paint her roses!"

"But they aren't painted!" Henrietta began to feel that she had very certainly fallen into a world of crazy people.

"Well that won't do at all," Alice declared. "You'll have to paint them red right away."

"But he just told me not to paint anything!" Henrietta said, realizing as she did that there was probably no point in arguing with an insane person.

"Yes, but you'll have to do it before she finds out that you've planted the wrong kind. There's paint over there." Alice gestured, and Henrietta saw a white rose dripping red paint, and a little further on, a bucket of paint and a dripping brush. "You don't have much time."

Henrietta looked back and discovered Alice holding a pocket watch and grinning in a very creepy manner. "Red paint?" she asked skeptically.

"If that's what you'd like to think!" the cat cheerfully replied. He began to reform in front of the other girl, with a matching grin that Henrietta really didn't like.

She looked around the brick walls, at the red images spattered on them, and then at the girl before her. "I'd rather not," she said slowly.

"Probably for the best," the cat declared. "Bad enough that you stole her clotted cream and planted yellow roses. Don't want to be caught in a cover up on top of it." He began to fade out again.

"On top of what?" Alice asked politely.

"Why, the other side of the world!" the cat declared. Both broke into paroxyms of laughter, Alice's head wobbling dangerously again.

Henrietta began to back away, desperate to find a way out. When she expected to hit the wall behind her, nothing held her in, and she turned and ran. Down a long tunnel, voices and noises she couldn't identify swirled behind her, and above all the disturbing hysterical laughter.

Finally seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, Henrietta put on a burst of speed and ran smack into the wall behind the rose garden. Stumbling backwards, she felt the bushes scratch her, but she continued to backpedal. As fast as she could, she dashed through the salon doors into the house and clutched her violin.

This was real. Her violin and her lesson and her mother's drapes with the yellow roses on them. No one was going to cut off her head in here.

Henrietta resumed her lesson, determinedly looking away from the garden windows the entire time. When she finished a while later, and had put away her instrument and music, she had to close the doors. Despite her determination not to, she chanced a quick peek into the garden.

Was that a spot of red on one of her mother's roses? Henrietta took half a step forward to investigate, but a faint sound of laughter reached her ears and she leapt back. Slamming and bolting the windows, she drew the curtains for good measure.

They wouldn't take _her_ head!


End file.
